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When the iPhone first introduced apps in 2008, a feverish gold rush followed. New APIs and design standards made it easier to make softwareeven by non-coders. The question became: Could you create a small experience, perhaps something as simple as a fart button app, that could make you a million dollars in a weekend? (And while some people definitely cashed in, a majority of us did not.) Nearly two decades later, the rest of us have another opportunity to rethink mobile software. Weve entered the era of vibe codingin which complex software can be generated with nothing but plain language prompts. Now, rather than offer developers the tools to make the next hit app, it seems phone manufacturers may urge everyone to vibe-code their next widget. The hypebeasty smartphone company Nothing Technology has launched what its calling Essential Apps in beta on its website. What that really means is that, for the first time, you can simply describe the widget youd like to have (maybe the latest scores from your favorite team, or a slideshow of beautiful public domain imagery), and it will become a widget that you can download right to your phone, or even share with the public. Nothings mantra? One billion apps for one billion people. I still prefer the term widgets for what Nothing is sharing, but Ill admit that its a good line. Because it seems quite feasible that, for many of us, our first experience with vibe coding will actually be a widget. The rise of widgets Full-blown apps have been the main modality of smartphones since the early days of the App Store. But the industry has embraced widgets for nearly as longas lighter-weight, glanceable apps that are always open on your screen. Desktop computers had used widgets for years before Google introduced them to Android in 2009. Apple held out until 2014. While theyve always represented a strange mortar of our digital lives, widgets have remained an established part of our app lexicon as bite-size vessels for information that can live wherever you want on your phone. Vibe coding is amazing, but its still involved in building something as complex as a modern app. Widgets, on the other hand, have such a limited scope that they seem perfect for an inexperienced vibe coder. The information you want is the interface, and theres not a lot more to it. Nothing isnt technically the first company to come up with the idea of vibe-coding widgets on a mobile platform. You may have forgotten that this was also the biggest promise from Rabbit, the early AI hardware company that captured the tech worlds imagination in 2024before turning out to be less capable than promised. (Meanwhile, its founder, Jesse Lyu, is building a new piece of hardware completely dedicated to vibe coding that’s called the Cyberdeck.) Nothing has sold over 7 million devices to a loyal crowd that appreciates its quirkier, more expressive approach to design. Its phones have touches like its Glyph Button on the back, which can contain cute micrographics that evoke the Atari era. [Photo: Nothing] As it turns out, Nothings vibe coding supports new animations for this buttonand people have already generated music visualizers and timers. Other early works you can find from Nothing vibe coderswhich, for now, seem to be Nothings own employeesinclude tic-tac-toe and phases of the moon. Theyre also letting people generate and share custom music equalizers and photo slideshows. Two different early hands-ons both suggest Nothings vibe coding isnt as perfectly automated as we may imagine, but the modality seems promising all the same. While I dont believe every human on earth is capable of developing the next Uber by vibe coding, its easy to imagine myriad people having a tiny, very specific problem related to their commutes, or a transportation challenge that theyd love to solve. And vibe-coded widgets offer a reasonable container for those solutions. This is only the beginning This is all to say that while Nothing was first(ish) out of the gate, I suspect vibe-coded widgets are going to be an extraordinarily popular modality sold by phone manfacturers. And not even necessarily because people need or want them, but because their limited scope seems just right for welcoming the masses into a cutting-edge behavior. Samsung, for instance, is already trying to distinguish its platform with AI integration of all types. Google, a global leader in all things AI at this moment, is almost certainly working on tools like this. On our December By Design podcast, former Fast Company design editorand current Google senior staff designer working on Android AICliff Kuang suggested vibe coding would be the biggest paradigm for the next decade or even century. Even Apple, a company I would naturally assume would never touch vibe coding, may come to surprise us. Consider that its already embraced generative AI in Messages and other apps, and it just signed a deal to source its next AI model from Google. I could certainly imagine Apple, working with its collection of internally designed components, creating a widget customizer for its users. And of course, we cannot count out Chinese companies, which produce around 50% of smartphones globally. Huawei, in particular, already offers a variety of Service Cardsan evolution of the widget that can turn an app into a little card, complete with the apps core functions, right on the home screen. Why couldnt AI make the perfect intermediary here, for a user to customize exactly what they want to surface from an app? Im not saying that vibe-coded widgets will become the predominant way we interact with our smartphones. As few as 15% of Apple users report actively using them today. But I do believe that a combination of feasible scope and FOMO-driven strategy could drive the entire smartphone industry in this direction over the next year or two. In other words: If you havent delved into vibe coding yet, dont be surprised if your first project is a widget.
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E-Commerce
It looks like ordinary paint, but a new coating called Lilypad Paint has a hidden ability to pull moisture out of the air. It works like a dehumidifier, without the energy use. If its on the wall in your bathroom, it can suck water vapor out of the air after youve taken a shower. The paint holds the humidity in nano-size pores, and then slowly releases it as humidity levels fall in the room. Under the paint, a layer of custom primer acts like a smart gatekeeper ensuring that vapor doesnt end up accumulating in the wall, says Derek Stein, founder and CEO of Adept Materials, the startup behind the product. A passive fix for moisture in modern buildings The tech spun out of Steins research as a physics professor at Brown University. While working with students on the design of a solar-powered house, he learned about a growing problem: As buildings become more energy-efficient, air quality can get worse. As were making buildings really, really tight thermally, they tend to trap in moisture and trap in air, Stein says. A new house might use less energy for heating and cooling but more for ventilationand if the system doesnt work perfectly, the home could end up with mold. Older houses that dont have mechanical ventilation also often have mold problems. [Photo: Adept Materials] Stein iterated on new materials that could passively regulate humidity inside a building and landed on the idea of a simple two-layer structure. Its like a material machine that can regulate humidity in a space while also teaching direction to the wall, he says. The design moves moisture out of the wall while preventing it from getting in. In conversations with the construction industry, Stein realized there was a clear demand for a product like this. In 2018, he left Brown and launched the startup to bring it to market. It became clear to me that to make this happen on any realistic time scale, I had to leave the ivory tower and go out into the proverbial real world to do this, he says. Scaling up outside the lab The basic tech, which the company calls Vaporwisp, could be incorporated in many different building materialsdrywall, for example, would benefit from humidity management. Adept Materials is also developing a new building wrap for construction that can keep moisture out without trapping it inside. In a seed round of funding a little over a year ago, investors included large home builders like D.R. Horton. Why are home builders investing in this? Its not just because of the paint. A lot of their problems, operationally, are related to moisture, says Stein. (The technology can also have broader applications, including packaging to keep food fresh longer, or moisture-wicking clothing.) Paint was a logical place to start in part because its used both by builders and by consumers working on DIY projects. And unlike drywalla low-margin, unbranded productpaint is something consumers can seek out by brand. [Photo: Adept Materials] In hundreds of lab tests on the paint, the team showed that the system worked as expected to absorb and release moisture. In two identical rooms filled with humidity sensors, testers painted one with Lilypad and one with ordinary paint, and ran a series of humidity assessments. The new paint kept moisture out of the walls. The process works as long as the paint is on the walls. In other words, the performance is tied to its physical properties, not to chemical additives that can wear out. Lilypad works because it gives moisture a place to go, and a way back out, Stein explains. When humidity rises, water temporarily clings to tiny surfaces inside the paint. When the air dries, that moisture naturally releases back into the room. Its the same everyday process that makes a bathroom mirror fog up and then clear again. The difference is scale: Inside a gallon of Lilypad, those invisible surfaces add up to about a million times the area of a mirror. After ensuring that the coating worked as expected on humidity, the company optimized it as a paint. The finish had to be perfect. It was engineered to flow onto walls as smoothly as top paint brands. We’ve really been engineering this to be a no-compromise paint, Stein says. The other thing, as a startup company, without the economies of scale that Sherwin-Williams and Benjamin Moore will have, we’re not going to be able to compete on price. And so we’re necessarily going to be competing with higher-end products. . . . We cannot be deficient in any of that. Because its being sold not just as a paint, but as a coating to control moisture, its sold at a premium: A kit with a gallon of primer and a gallon of paint goes for $175. [Photo: Adept Materials] At launch, the coating is available only in white. There’s a a kind of poorly kept secret within the paint industry that about 80% of paint sales are whites, Stein says. So people go into the paint store, they bring the pillows and a sample of the drapes and the whatever and they’re checking all the colors, and after an hour they go up to the front and they say, ‘A gallon of double white.’ We wanted to free people of the decision paralysis and free ourselves of the operational headaches of having to offer every color under the rainbow. He notes that the company can easily add colors later. Saving energy and money In an ultra-tight new building like a passive house, the paint cant replace mechanical ventilation. But it can reduce how much ventilation needs to be used, saving energy. “If you can automatically regulate humidity, it can lighten the load on the HVAC systemand that’s not insignificant,” Stein says. “The fraction of energy that goes to managing humidity in a building is typically . . . about 10% to about 40%.” In an older building, Lilypad coating can reduce moisture without the need to install expensive new HVAC systems. Adept Materials is now in discussions with the Boston Housing Authority about a pilot that would test the paint inside public housing apartments that don’t have exhaust fans in bathrooms. “It’s accessible by design,” Stein says. “My hope is that while we are releasing this and people are going to be putting it in fancy remodels, there’s also the opportunity to put it into public housing.”
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E-Commerce
Need some recipe inspo for dinners this week? Look no further than the latest viral food trend on TikTok: boy kibble. The gym bros answer to girl dinner, which gained traction online in 2023 as an artfully arranged snack plate, boy kibble is consumed mainly by men trying to hit their protein goals while keeping calories low. Its 8PM and Im rawdogging some 93/7 ground beef, one enthusiast posted on TikTok. Were not the same. @thequadfather03 #boykibble #girldinner #fyp original sound – thequadfather03 In an era of strange diets (see meatfluencers scarfing down whole sticks of butter and wellness warriors championing E. coliriddled raw milk) a meal that consists largely of rice, minced meat, and perhaps a handful of vegetables isnt particularly shocking. Minor details like flavor matter less than how quickly and efficiently macros can be consumed. Here, food is simply fuel. A profile of the typical boy kibble consumer has emerged. Social media suggests these men are often corporate workers, the kind who also order a slop bowl for lunch from Cava or Sweetgreen. That said, some are pushing back on the stereotype. Making boy kibble in a girl-dinner-trying-to-add-protein-to-my-meal way, not a scary-villainous-bro way, one creator posted. The viral food trend has also been referred to as human kibble online, with women spotted eating it too. Substitute the ground beef for tofu and I feel horribly seen. Still, scrolling social media, it appears to skew male. @reginmantuano making boy kibble and i genuinely hit a bro state original sound – sunshinebenzi The act of cooking and consuming boy kibble is now known as ground beef oclock. One viral video shows two men in stacked apartment windows, both simultaneously pan-frying what we can only assume is ground beef. Boyhood, the caption reads. @cpla20 Boyhood original sound – NickiMVerses – Running home for ground beef oclock reads another video’s caption. In the clip, a man maintains a vice grip on his pack of beef while striding purposefully back to his apartment. @daniellafernandareyes he saw that 93/7 on sale #fypviral #fyp #newyork #nyc #financebro – Still, many people can relate to the feeling that coming up with a meal that sits within the Venn diagram of healthy, easy, and delicious every night for the rest of our lives can feel overwhelming. It may be part of why a recent viral New York Times article about Americans DoorDash habits struck a nerve. Genuinely unnerved by the DoorDash discourse, one X user wrote. I am Gods worst and most unwilling cook and yet when I say I dont cook I mean I put $11 worth of pre-marinated meat in the air fryer and serve it with $2 worth of rice. Genuinely unnerved by the DoorDash discourse I am Gods worst and most unwilling cook and yet when I say I dont cook I mean I put $11 worth of pre-marinated meat in the air fryer and serve it with $2 worth of rice. Youre telling me a large number of people cant even do that pic.twitter.com/mr3H9nTaWW— Charlotte Lee (@cljack) February 2, 2026 In that context, boy kibble isnt a sign of grindset optimization maxxing. Instead, its a simple, nutritious, and affordable way for burned-out workers to take one responsibility off their plates.
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E-Commerce
On the way to work, you see a TikTok video of the president admitting to a crime. In the elevator, you hear your favorite band, but the song is completely unfamiliar. At your desk, you open an email from an executive in another department. It contains valid sales information and discusses a relevant legal issue, but the wording sounds oddly wooden. After lunch, the CEO sends all managers a link to a new app she had casually proposed just a few days earlier. Later, you interview a job candidate via Zoom, but the person looks different from his LinkedIn picture. Any or all of these thingsthe video, the song, the email, the CEOs app, the candidatecould have been generated by AI tools or agents. But our epistemic defaults, I’d argue, are still set to assume these things are human-created unless available information proves otherwise. We have not yet entered a zero-trust paradigm where content is generated unless proven authentic. Instead, we find ourselves in an anxious middle ground. The question now arises whenever we encounter a new image, video, or piece of information: Is this AI-generated? Increasingly, the answer will be yes. We are close enough to that zero-trust reality that we can see it approaching on the horizon. Beyond deepfakes Deepfakes were just the beginning. AI-generated video designed to mislead or incite was, not so long ago, seen as a novelty. Now its common in everything from revenge porn to politics. AI-generated music has gone mainstream. Last year, a fully generated country song called Walk My Walk by Breaking Rust reached No. 1 on the Billboard Country Digital Song Sales chart in the U.S. An AI-generated TV ad, made with Googles Veo 3, Gemini, and ChatGPT, ran during Game 3 of the NBA Finals last year. According to a Gallup Q3 2025 report, 45% of U.S. employees now use AI at work. In a similar vein, the email deliverability firm ZeroBounce found in a September 2025 survey that one in four workers use AI daily to draft emails, and that number has likely increased. The same survey found that a quarter of workers suspect their performance review was written using AI. By most accounts, the use of AI agents in corporate workflows is still in the early innings. But AI companies say were moving toward a future in which agents from different departments collaborate to complete back-office tasks, such as compensating suppliers, or to compile decision-support materials, like a business case for entering a new market or making an acquisition. Its already likely that AI agents, including deep research or business intelligence tools, play some role in assembling reports managers receive at work. Amazons AWS says its customers have used AI agents to save more than 1 million hours of manual effort. McKinsey predicts that by 2030 the use of agents and robots could create about $2.9 trillion in value in the U.S. if organizations redesign their workflows for people, agents, and robots working together. (Of course, McKinsey wants to help them do that.) Depending on her technical savvy, the CEO mentioned above may have mocked up a new app using Replit or Bolt. These so-called vibe-coding tools can generate a credible proof of concept in a weekend. She may then have handed it off to software engineering, whose developers might use Claude Code, Codex, or Cursor to turn the idea into a production-ready app that connects to company databases and third-party tools. A late-2025 Stack Overflow study claims that about 84% of developers now use, or plan to use, AI coding tools, with roughly half already using them daily. When applying for remote jobs, more candidates are trying to improve their odds with AI tools that enhance their face or voice or generate answers in real time during interviews. The voice authentication firm Pindrop says that in its own video interviews it regularly encounters applicants using deepfake software and other generative AI tools to try to land a job. Gartner predicts that by 2028 a quarter of all remote applicants will be AI-generated. Deepfakes once threatened to distort reality; now the distortion is structural, embedded in the systems that produce culture, manage companies, and decide who gets hired. AI, weaponized But the scammer may have a different goal in mind, and this points to scenarios where generative AI tools arent just used as timesavers, but as weapons. AI can help conceal the real identities of job applicants who are trying to extract sensitive company information or, worse, secure a role in order to install ransomware. Scammers are also increasingly using advanced face- and voice-swapping tools for outright fraud. In 2024, a team of scammers posed as top executives of the engineering firm Arup during a video call using sophisticated AI tools. They tricked a finance employee into sending them $25 million. We sense that our epistemic defaultsour AI slop detectors, if you willmay lag behind what technology can already do. And that suspicion is correct. The holy-shit moments accompanying new AI breakthroughs now arrive with striking regularity. Recently, some users and journalists concluded that the OpenClaw agent platform had become sentient after watching agents complete tasks independently, deploy humans to finish assignments, and then gather in their own online forum to discuss it. At the same time, many ChatGPT users are grieving the forthcoming loss of GPT-4o because they developed a personal attachment to the model. New Chinese video generation systems such as ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0 and Kling 3.0 are producing highly controllable video thats increasingly difficult to distinguish from footage captured by a camera. The next tech wave Social networks, in many ways, act as intermediariesproviding a wide-angle lens through which a person sees the world. To increase engagement and ad views, Facebook distorted that lens, to the detriment of both democracy and children. This week, Facebook-parent Meta is defending itself in a Los Angeles courtroom after years of deploying design features, including endless scroll, that critics say proved harmfuly addictive for younger users. That was the last tech revolution, and it depended on user-made content. But with AI, the web can generate its own content on demand. This may put an immense amount of power in the hands of a few AI companies, perhaps even more so than was given to social media companies. With so much money and influence at stake, the question is whether AI companies will do what firms like Meta did not and draw a clear line between human-created and machine-generated content. I seriously doubt it, especially with a billionaire class and a Trump administration doing everything possible to stifle legislation that might protect AI consumers. If thats the case, then maybe taking a zero-trust approach to everything that appears on our screens is the only rational path forward.
Category:
E-Commerce
Want more housing market stories from Lance Lamberts ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. One of the clearest messages from KB Homes leadership during its last earnings call was that the homebuilderranked No. 526 on the Fortune 1000is intentionally shifting away from elevated spec inventory and back toward more built-to-order (BTO)which will also help firm up its compressing margins given that BTO has higher margins than spec. When the supply chain crashed [during the pandemic] and our build times significantly extended, it was very difficult to sell a built-to-order home to a buyer when it was going to take 10 or 11 months to build You cant lock the interest rate for that long, Mezger tells ResiClub. So they did more spec. Thats over now. Weve significantly compressed our build times Were back down to four months or less, which is our historical level, Mezger tells ResiClub. With shorter cycle times and shifted conditions, KB Home wants to move to less spec. For years and years, [built-to-order] was 70% to 80% of our business, Mezger noted. In the fourth quarter, deliveries were around 50% BTO.In late January 2026, ResiClub interviewed KB Home CEO Jeffrey Mezger and COO Rob McGibney. Beginning March 1, 2026, McGibney will assume the CEO role, with Mezgerwho has served as CEO since 2006moving into the newly created position of executive chairman. Below are some main housing market takeaways from our recent conversation with KB Home. KB Home says its Florida business is showing signs of stabilizationbut the story is hyper-local Speaking on their September 2025 earnings call, KB Home executives said they had cut home prices across Floridalast years weakest pocket of the housing marketand were beginning to see signs of stabilization in the Sunshine State as a result. Do they still stand behind that signs of stabilization statement? Thats still largely accurate But it really remains very market specific, McGibney tells ResiClub. McGibney adds that some Florida communities have improved, allowing KB Home to lift prices a little this spring. Other Florida communities remain sluggish, requiring additional price adjustments even after earlier cuts. We look at every community as its own business, McGibney explained. It can vary significantly within the same metroTampa, Orlando, Jacksonvilleyou name it. As for magnitude, KB Home estimates most Florida home price adjustments since peak are modest. Even -10% would be on the extreme side, McGibney said, referring to price moves from peak levels. Most of what were talking about is in a -1% to -10% range. The new-home supply pipeline is pulling back some in softer markets Weve seen [housing] starts come down year-over-year in many [weaker] markets, Mezger tells ResiClub. Especially spec starts. KB Home says the pullback is helping limit further inventory pressure in markets like Florida, Phoenix, and Denver where prices just ran up too much relative to incomes. It’s good to see that there’s not a lot more inventory being injected into some of the softer markets, and I think that’s going to help places like Florida stabilize, Mezger says. The new-vs-existing price gap is compressingand thats making new construction more attractive According to the ResiClub New Home Premium Index, the median sales price of new single-family homes in October 2025 was -1.2% lower than the median sales price of existing single-family homes. This shift reflects how the affordability-strained housing market of the past three years has played out unevenly across segments. Many existing-home sellers have resisted downward price pressure, often at the expense of being able to transact. Homebuilders, by contrast, have been more willing to make affordability adjustmentsmost notably through price cuts, incentives, and a greater mix of smaller homesto avoid a sharper pullback in new-home sales. While theres no question that the new-construction premium has fallen meaningfully from a few years ago, national median comparisons (i.., ResiClubs index) likely overstate the magnitude of the decline somewhat due to mix-shift effects. KB Home says its premium has compressed; however, it still exists. There’s a lot of [existing] sellers that have stuck to pricing that’s very high, and they haven’t moved off the pricing so it doesn’t trade. And historically, we’ve always, over time, been able to support a 10% premium to resaleand above 15% when there was no resale inventory. The premiums for the industry gapped well above that [during the Pandemic Housing Boom], and you have seen them compress. But in our case, we try to target our product when we open a community to be within that 10% to 15% range. And when we do that, we’ve [still] seen a buyer that will absolutely take new over used, Mezger tells ResiClub.
Category:
E-Commerce
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